Cochiti Oca
by Complica
Summary: 7.8 Billion people in the world. 780,000 estimated mutants. Most of them not giving even one shit it about saving the world.
1. Chapter 1

Cochiti Oca was a wound in three acres of otherwise pleasant enough red ground, cut by patient winds almost as old as the woman who made her home in them. All soft curves and lines, the narrow strip of land wound three miles of narrow paths from the river to the south up to the inclining grade to the north. Upriver took you out of the thirty foot deep canyon and away from the narrow walls of rock that wanted to swallow you up.

It was beautiful, the way the sun poured in from the height of the crevice, obliterating the tops of the rocks all around you. It gave the illusion that there could never be anything beyond that point. Nothing more worth exploring then what existed down here anyway. The winds whistled as they blew through the narrowest parts, carrying sand to buff the rocks smooth.

The people that once lived here, carved out pueblos in the far south wall, along the narrowest of dozens of paths within the Oca. Three levels of small, single room homes. One moment you're squeezing through a path so narrow you had to move through it sideways, and the next you're all but falling into a dark doorway.

Each wall of each room of each level of the Pueblos was elaborately carved. Researchers examined the site in the 1970s and mistakenly applied generalized Apache meanings to the symbols. Hunts and family ritual and the like. All the markings separate and formless, as the researchers didn't believe it was possible for such early man to have a sense of continuity.

The woman who lived here now knew better. She knew it was a wandering band of Aztec, who separated from their wealthy kin and traveled north that first found this site. The carvings told of the history of their people, a journey that lasted three generations and claimed over half of their numbers. They lived in these rooms only so long as it took to fill each space with their story. After that, they set out into the desert and were killed or assimilated into the tribes that populate the more fertile bits of land.

Burnee spent the first ten or fifteen months here, teaching herself how to read that history. The drawings and symbols were a language of their own, not so very removed from the formal language of her beginnings. It just wasn't grammar and syntax like modern archaeologists saw such things. They'd figure it out eventually. Someone will one day make the connection between Egyptian Hieroglyphics and the cave drawings of the Pueblo Indians. That lucky researcher would be famed a visionary whilst rewriting the history of early man.

Not that Burnee wanted to help. She was being selfish. She wanted the knowledge for herself. And once she had it, she laid out her belongings near a fire pit in the room of choosing. That chapter explained why the young leader decided to leave his home. He loved of one beautiful virgin girl in defiance of the Gods she'd was promised to. Burnee's possessions, all bundled up into a ratty backpack, sat in the northeast corner. Above it were the symbols that showed the lovers facing the God's wrath. The story would have ended there, had soldiers tasked with their sacrifice not joined them instead, leading them to safety.

In the southeast corner were several big clay pots, stacked just under the description of the two's first coupling. A bit of artistic license had been taken to include thunder and lightning. The wrath of the Gods angry at the loss of their virgin sacrifice seemed a bit hard to believe. Not to mention the resulting of nineteen births that, along with the conspiring soldiers, produced the unnamed tribe that would later write this story. Burnee figured they would have had to carve out a few dozen more rooms from the rock had they described each birth in turn. Either that or the depiction of the heavily pregnant woman just above her water pots was part dog, maybe part sturgeon.

In this state she lived for the last twenty years. Each morning she'd wake and carry the emptiest of the clay pots down to the river. She'd bathe, drink, refill the pot, and marvel at how blue a sky could be when it was cut against by deep red, hematite filled rocks. Burnee would catch a few fish, pick a few herbs meant to flavor them, and then a few more meant for after dinner, before heading back. She'd find dry wood along the way to feed her firepit. It never took much. The embers had been flickering for almost a decade now without going out. The ash was old and fertile, the flames resilient and hardy. Like her, they needed only a bit of something fresh to renew their strength.

In 1999, the land she'd moved into was incorporated into the Cochiti reservation. It existed on the far edge of their border, and was considered a sacred site. Not that the Cochiti really understood that their people were part of the story on these walls. The specifics were lost to them, even if the fundamental sense of importance permeated. Researchers and historians intent on cataloging and misfiling everything around them were unceremoniously banned from the site. Burnee never asked the Cochiti if she could live here. They never tried to force her out. She assumed that was because they sensed she was important as well. In this case, it worked better to keep her secrets then her customary disguise of not being important, so she allowed it.

Each month, on the morning first new moon, she'd travel north, out of the Oca and onto flat land. It took two days to travel forty miles to the town. Once there, she was dusty and sweaty and generally pathetic looking, but regardless the tribe welcomed her with active apathy. She traded her after dinner herbs to a boy for currency, and currency in the shops for treats and supplies.

The latter she got first, as she was an adult and knew that was the reasonable course of action. This time it was for a new jacket. A long one that would protect her from the dusty winds this winter. When the temperature dropped in this land, it could reach unreasonably bitter levels, as if the sun itself had abandoned the earth all together. Burnee saw hypothermia only just this last year. She didn't like to repeat recent mistakes. The rawhide coat was strong and unlined. It would work both for the now and the later. It took most of the currency she'd collected, but there would be enough left for a treat. Just enough, making the trip still very much worth while.

She changed in a small space between the coat maker's shop and a barber. All her clothing was dust burnt to the point where they carried a rust colored hue overtop of whatever original dyes the maker had intended. It was well enough they did, as the shirt was once man's dress shirt, with ruffles and pins, fashionable in the early sixties, when it was acquired. The jeans were once heavily dyed, but otherwise unremarkable, as some styles remained mostly static through time. She'd have been fetching and noticeable in the bright blues and pinks when these things were new. But muted under age, sun and sand, she was unremarkable if a little pathetic and scrawny. Pulling the new, fresh jacket on changed all that. Made it look purposeful rather than neglectful, and distressed was a fashion wasn't it? At least at some point, Burnee was sure it was. Fashion moved too fast for her, looped around too much. It was a bit of a carnival ride, which Burnee rathered not participate, except with the necessity of blending in. To that purpose, she pulled long, black, unkept hair back to a distressed looking bun on the back of her head and tied it there with a strap of fabric.

She stood, sliding her backpack over her shoulder and stared out into the street ahead of her, just past a dumpster and a stray calico cat. A young couple chased each other joyfully down the street, playing an old game that Burnee watched throughout the ages. Cairo and Morocco, Augustine and El Paso, courting was always done by chasing and being caught, then released to repeat the process. And as the young girl pulled away from her suitor, laughing and running out of view, Burnee laughed as well. Her whole face changed with the amusement. The shadows on her face softened. The small lines marking her eyes and brow and cheeks filled in with fuller, more resilient flesh. A warmth touched her gray eyes, bringing them forward where they'd been slightly sunken. Then her frame shifted, a touch more buoyant and soft, but smaller, almost by six inches in height. The coat that touched her calves now brushed her ankles as a teenager stepped out into the street and crossed the empty asphalt to the convenience store on the corner.

The store keep was a heavy set woman with skin too pale for this climate or this reservation. A quiet, lonely woman who came here to be as far away from everything she left behind as possible, the store keep passed her time by giving each of her customers names and playing out their imagined lives in her empty expanses of time. She recognized the new customer as YooHoo Girl. YooHoo Girl was probably homeless, maybe because her family were drunkards or in some other way useless, and saved up just enough money each month to get a glass bottle of liquid chocolate flavored water fortified with the only vitamins and minerals she probably ever got. The store keep had been here ten years now, and watched YooHoo Girl grow from a child of about six or seven to nearly an adult. Everytime she smiled for her, the store keep would suddenly remember that YooHoos were buy one get one free. Burnee smiled for the woman, got her second YooHoo, and left out the back exit towards another dumpster and another cat, this time a tabby.

She sat on an empty milk crate, near where the cat was chasing an insect under the dumpster's rubber flap. The cap of her first YooHoo popped open with a satisfying sound. The cool milky textured water was pure joy. With her backpack rested on at her ankles, she savored it, alternating between letting a mouthful rest on her tongue till it warmed to her body temperature and swallowing down quick bursts of the liquid so that the coldness reached the back of her throat, nearly to her stomach before it warmed. By the time she was done with the first bottle, the tabby had given up its chances of dinner and came over to rub on Burnee's leg. The woman looked down at him, eyes once more slightly sunken and cool, lines around her mouth and eyes once more apparent. If the cat was at all bothered that she was suddenly bigger than she had been when she first sat down, he didn't let it show. Burnee loved that about domestic animals. They were far more accepting of the oddities of the world then the people responsible for domesticating them. One hand, thinner than it had been, reached down to pet the top of the tabby's head. The tabby, apparently deciding that he didn't have to stand for that, quickly scampered away towards something else that interested him enough to mark as his own. Burnee put her top on her empty bottle, and tucked it safely in her backpack, along with six other YooHoo bottles, some empty, some filled with water. There were nearly a dozen notebooks of varying degrees of disrepair tucked in there, along with some clothing folded neatly at the bottom. The zipper was barely capable of holding the whole thing closed. Likely her next trip out would require a replacement bag.

Burnee contemplated that with a mute frown before reaching down for her second bottle of YooHoo. From back in the convenience store, there was a loud popping sound followed by a shout. In less time than it would have taken Burnee to process the urgency of needing to run or hide, a man in a black hoodie ran out the exact door she'd left through earlier. He had a bag in one hand, full of what looked like the contents of the store keep's register, and a pistol in the other. He looked right at Burnee. A young, round face, with soft eyes that would have seemed kind on just about anyone else in any other situation. He looked scared. Desperate. He stared frantically into the eyes of the 30 something woman sitting next to the dumpster, looking right back at him. She was marking every detail about his face, his shape, his identity. She'd know him on sight. She'd pick him out from a line up. She'd send him to jail for the rest of his life, or even be the reason they strapped him to a table and pumped him full of drugs that would kill him. She was going to kill him, so he had to kill her first.

The YooHoo bottle hit at just the right angle to crack open on the cement. It splattered it's cool, sweet contents through dirt and rocks and onto insects in the crevices. The tabby hissed and ran from the other side of the dumpster. Burnee leaned backwards against the wall, now splattered with what had been previously contained inside her skull. Her heart beat a few more seconds before it stopped, gray eyes staring back at the round faced man accusingly.

Being dead was always a bit disconcerting. It wasn't pain, though there was pain. It wasn't cold or warm or light or dark. It was only this great sense of apartness. A realization that you are separate from the container that held you. That it's no more a part of you then a pilot is a part of his plane or a knight a part of his armor. Your body is something you are contained in, and when you die, you are released from it.

Or in Burnee's case, trapped inside it. Every cell of every part of the container that housed Burnee was constantly working to reset itself to its midpoint. The median of life is the peek of its development, the age when childbirth was best done, when the cells were most awake and receptive and alive. The body of the woman born at least 4,800 years ago as Ya'aburnee in Tanis, Egypt wanted to be alive, and as such would not release her when it died. Instead, it reverted back to the crest of its existence, and forced her live on in that state.

It happened fairly rapidly. The round faced man was gone. There was a bit of blood splatter on the back of her brand new coat, and a good deal more on the wall behind her. Burnee blinked her eyes and sat forward. She wiped the drop of blood off a dusty but otherwise undamaged forehead with the sleeve of the coat. Her dark hair covered the blood, and flesh and bone collected on the underside of her messy bun. There were police sirens. She had no time to eliminate the evidence on her or left behind by her. She stood, pulling her backpack on and over her shoulders, and quickly moving between two buildings where she'd last seen the tabby run off through. If there was one thing Burnee knew, it was that people did not like oddity. The main road would be the quickest way out of town and back into the desert. It would be a long walk to a new place, but there would be no choice. Oddities were at their worst when they were noticed.


	2. Chapter 2

Diana managed to skip the whole of the first day of 12th grade in Sonala High School. She ran a package earlier that morning and then spent the rest of the afternoon with Blake in the alley between 31st and Valerie. It was a great day up until she rode her bike into the path of that squad car.

Even sitting in the back of a squad car, the thought of him brought a faint smile to her face. Blake was older, but far more gullible. He genuinely liked her. Liked everything about her. The smell of her hair. The sound of her voice. The pot she brought him once in a while.

Fortunately, they'd smoked the joint in the early morning, before Diana left the squat, got on her bike, and started heading towards Dawg's neighborhood to get paid. Otherwise, when the cop picked her up, he would have something more than truancy to write her up on.

School was halfway over, but they brought her there anyway. She sat in the parking lot, uncuffed in the back of the car, watching the kids move in and out of hallways with complete disinterest. One of the guys pointed and then the whole group of them laughed. Diana recognized him immediately. Juan Yolds was never going to leave her alone now that he had new fodder with which to annoy her. Let a guy get you drunk and screw you one time, and suddenly it is his mission in life to follow you around and remind you of how regretful the whole experience was.

Not that reputation mattered all that much to Diana. Let his group of jocks think her a slut. Had she not had sex with Juan that first time, she wouldn't have had sex with anyone else. Which meant she wouldn't have had sex with Blake. And that would have really been regrettable.

Besides, being a slut had the advantage of instant celebrity combined with a low overall regard. People knew who she was, but didn't think her a threat to anything. No one would ever suspect that girl who Juan Yolds banged in the Wal-Mart parking lot on a dare.

The flunky in blue reappeared, flanked by the dean. She'd have detention for a while and probably some hopelessly mundane assignment like a paper on the importance of attendance in class.

The officer opened the car door. Fortunately Diana didn't recognize him. There were a few cops she was getting on a first name basis with. And some of them were just too damn creepy for even her tastes.

Diana crawled out the tight space and took a minute to adjust what she called a sweater. She'd disassembled all the key parts. Though she wore them all, she wore them in blatant disarray. It was long, black, and hand woven, the sleeves more or less in one piece, stitched along a cut edge level with her shoulder blades to keep from unraveling further. They covered her hands for the most part, and Diana had a tendency to stick her fingers through the holes. She weaved the frayed bottom hem through the loops of her second hand, flea market, acid washed jeans, forming a belt that hung down over hips and thighs. Rapidly disintegrating boots and a blue tank shirt completed the look. It was fully dysfunctional but completely within the boundaries of the current dress code.

A few new rules were pending on her behalf, Diana figured.

The dean was saying something to her. The officer had a hand on his gun. She wasn't paying attention to either of them. She planned on ignoring them both until they shut up and directed her towards class, but then the officer made mention of her bike, which brought her mind back to the present.

"I need it. How the fuck am I gonna get home if you take my damn bike!" She protested, suddenly tearful and upset.

"Language" The dean barked.

"The school has phoned your father. He'll be here to pick you up at the end of the day and then he can retrieve your bike from the impound lot. I catch you out on it again when you should be here… and I'm gonna see to it that it disappears and you take the bus… understand?" The officer sensed weakness and threw some intimidation into his voice.

Diana slumped appropriately and let herself appear submissive and shaken as opposed to annoyed and vengeful. Best to let the authority figures think you fear their authority. After all, that cop worked so hard in those ten months of cop school just to learn how to intimidate sixteen year olds. It was always best not to disappoint the guy with the gun.

Maintaining the posture while she resumed ignoring them, she was eventually lead to the office, given a schedule, and sent to class.

* * *

"Oh, look... there she is. Diana- over there, walking in... look at her wrists. Try to see if you can see the marks from the cuffs!"

The problem with being on the free lunch program was that they never let you pick. All the frills and fluff was set aside for the paying students. The trash bin, as it was called, was the line on the far side of the room had premade lunches for all the welfare babies. Had their own special trays and everything. Couldn't have made it more humiliating if they tried.

Not that Diana minded. She could probably afford her own lunches if she ran a few more packages a week for Dawg. But then how would the rich kids get any more cheap fodder on her? That would be a tragedy. A god damn crying shame.

Diana grinned, crossing through the middle of the room for just that destination. She'd be damned if she let them see her sink in from the corner like she was trying to hide it. Some people might give her points for balls. Diana expected more of them to take points away for trashiness. At the end of the day it all evened out.

It was only due to her proximity to the table and an acutely trained sense of being talked about, that Diana heard her name mentioned, drawing in the rest of the sentence over the dull roar of the cafeteria.

She paused, grinned absently to herself, then turned about and strolled evenly towards the table in question. At the table's end, a pair of elbows smashed downward hard enough to send a sharp pain up her arms and into her shoulders, rattling lunches enough to garner attention.

The table shook, and everyone sitting there went instantly quiet and still. Eyes shot over to look at Diana, and the two girls nearest to her flinched and leaned away.

Nobody said a word.

Her oversized, disassembled sweater surcumed to gravity, falling down her forearms to reveal a pale pair of wrists, markless save for a half crescent shaped burn on the back of her hand, up near her thumb. Still red and puffy.

Diana turned them over back and forth to let everyone get a good view of what was being discussed. Then with a wag of her eyebrows, she snatched a piece of fruit off of someone's tray and started to make a getaway with it.

For several seconds, they all stayed still and silent.

Then with the feeling of an exhaled breath, they started talking again.

"Oh. My. God. I thought she was going to kill us."

"She probably HAS a knife."

"We've got metal detectors for the first couple weeks."

"Like that would stop someone like her."

"The cop would've searched her."

"I was so scared... did you see the way she smiled."

"I'm going to get my boyfriend to drive me home."

"Her wrists looked okay..."

"I wasn't looking at her wrists, I was watching her eyes."

"Did you see her burn?"

There was a sense of a narrow escape from something, all the girls felt it (or professed that they did), and they talked a lot quieter during the rest of the period. Nobody wanted to chance getting a repeat, or something worse.

* * *

Diana stuffed her newly acquired apple into her pocket long before she reached the trash bin to retrieve her lunch. There was an overweight girl with thrift store cloths a few sizes too small in line ahead of her. Diana didn't have to guess at the kinds of names the other kids called her. Not that Diana had any pity for her. Becky never stood up for herself. Didn't speak to anyone at all for that matter, save for those few times an uncaring teacher called on her specifically. Diana had one class with her last year where one teacher on some sort of sadistic crusade called on Becky every single day. The response was always underlying chuckles and rude remarks. Becky's voice, always barely a whisper, broke every single time and no self esteem was ever gained.

Diana wouldn't have any more classes with her, having fallen behind. That was probably a good thing. By the end of last year, Diana had almost convinced herself to make Becky a pet project in the theory that anyone, their button's pushed in the right order, could become a hard, cold, asskicker. As it was Diana just rolled her eyes as the girl took her lunch to the far end of the room just to sit in the table that had the fewest people.

Eyebrows wagging at the suddenly annoyed lunch lady, who upon catching sight of Diana instantly got a migraine. "Can I have a chocolate milk?" Questioned Diana, feigning innocence.

"We're all out." said the lunch lady with sigh.

"No you're not." Diana said confidently. "The truck comes every Thursday with twenty four cases of milk. In each case is thirty-four pints. Twelve of those cases always contain chocolate milk. Out of the percentage of kids buying their lunch instead of bringing it, most of them get sodas out of the machine over there. Which means every Wednesday you're throwing out milk by the caseload, so that your numbers match up and the school board can justifiably say all the kids here are getting their needed calcium. In the next couple of days you're going to be throwing out at least three cases of chocolate milk, and I'll pick it up out of the dumpster anyway..."

The lunch lady's face bunched up in disgust, but she reached out, snatched Diana's milk, and replaced it with a chocolate milk from under the counter.  
Considering herself victorious, Diana claimed her lunch and turned towards the tables. Unlike Becky, she went to closest table with an available seat, pushing away any bags or other indication that someone might be saving it for someone else. Completely ignoring the social strata involved in lunch room sitting, Diana always sat wherever she liked. Protests by the locals were always ignored until if or when it had caused a fight. That tended to happen more often than not.

This time seemed intent on consistency as some guy from the swim team returned to find his book bag on the floor and Diana in his seat.

The guy in question was a tall Brazilian youth with shiny, wavy hair,

rich, golden brown eyes, and a physique that made most women swoon from across the room. And at the moment, he was holding his recently acquired soda, and was staring at the ratty looking, and obviously not very intelligent girl that had just situated herself in his spot.

"Excuse me miss... but I believe you are in my seat." He spoke while giving his most charming smile, his voice warm and friendly, tinged with that exotic accent that sent every woman he had ever met twittering.

Diana turned briefly to regard him, green eyes less than approving. In the span of two seconds, she thought she had him figured out.

A have, as opposed to a have-not. Characteristics inherited through good genetics tend to make one regard themselves as deserving, entitled, and elevated.

In fact, the best way to deal with an entitlement driven have, as Diana had determined, was to give them nothing. So that's what she did. She turned back to her plate and stabbed her little plastic spork into a mush of reconstituted mash potatoes.

By this point, the others at the table were looking at the two expectantly, obviously waiting to see what their pal would do.

"Heh... perhaps I did not make myself clear..." He went on, leaning close to Diana and putting a hand on her shoulder, "This is MY seat... and these are MY friends. And we would appreciate it if you would take yourself somewhere else."

The sounds of the cafeteria died down a little in the area close to this scene…

A soft ooooh whispered through the air. People watched, hungry for the scandal and trouble. Someone was going to get it…

Diana paused, eying that hand before shrugging her shoulder in effort to remove it. She half turned to face him, elbow resting on the table, spork held loosely between her fingertips. "Actually you were perfectly clear. This is your seat." She waved the spork around her briefly in indication. "These are your friends." A purposely casual smile appeared on her face, the only indication of it being forcibly put there reflected in the hardness of her eyes.

"Between you and me, you really should talk to someone about your choice in companionship. Three years from now, every single one of these guys will be flunking out of the schools they got scholarships for, and competing for jobs at Wal-Marts. You at least have the potential of being a middle class man whore in the Rainbow District. But only if you start associating yourself with the right people now."

"HA!" A loud laugh rang out, but it wasn't quite clear who said it, or where it came from… a few chuckles raced around. A chair or two scraped across the floor, and in an earlier time, coats would have been pulled back from pistol grips…

She turned around again, slicing off a portion of what passed as meatloaf. "As for your seat... That I can't help you with. At least, not until the school engraves your name on it."

Laughter erupted around the table, and his face flushed in anger.

He straightened up, then motioned at two of his friends further down the table. As the two of them came up next to him, he nodded at Diana and the trio exchanged looks.

Before Diana had a chance to react, a set of hands reached around her and grabbed her tray. In the next moment, Rico had ahold of her bag too, and the two large guys he had called over grabbed Diana by her shoulders and lifted her bodily from the bench.

Her reaction was slow coming primarily due to a general inability to gracefully and rapidly untangle ones self from a standard school lunch table. But Diana was hardly an easy burden. Someone got kneed in the gut. Someone got an elbow in the jaw. It was a shame she couldn't get angled right to get one of them in the groin. She might have looked upset with all her twisting, kicking and headbutting. But that was just what her father taught her when she was still young enough to pay attention to him, and he was still sober enough to give advice. Never be still. Even when it seems hopeless, never just lay there and take it. There's always a chance. Movement makes you sweat. Sweat makes hands slippery. With enough of either one, eventually, someone's going to drop you.

Unfortunately, luck was against her.

"Didn't say a word… just started kicking and hitting them, like she had a right to sit there."

"I know… look at her, I bet she starts scratching."

"Or pulls a knife!"

A series of gasps went around the table of the girls that Diana had stolen the apple from…

And ignoring her protests, the senior boy marched down the isle, carrying her bag and tray, with the two other men dragging the furious Diana. The bag and tray were then dropped into one of the school garbage cans, and a moment later, Diana was set down next to them.

"There. Now you can eat your lunch with the rest of the trash." He smirked while his two buddies laughed, then they turned and went back to their table.

"Cunt." She called after him. "Takes three of you to move little ol' me. Tell me, does it take three people to hold your dick when you take a piss too? Masturbation must be pretty damn interesting in your household, what with your chronic inability to do a damn thing for yourself. I'm sensing some deep, troubling issues Mr. Man Whore, sir. School shrink's name is Barbara. She's a real nice woman. Helps kids come to terms with their sexuality all the time..." She rattled off in an amused tone of voice, as if she'd been the one to throw him in the trash.

"You best shut your mouth you little shit, or you're gonna wind up in that can along side your lunch." He had turned back to her, his warm eyes now cold with anger. He wasn't going to take crap from some filthy little hobo that couldn't even come to school without a police escort.

Diana, outnumbered and her situation utterly ignored by all nearby forms of adult supervision, finally shut up.

A scattered applause greeted the triumphant heroes.

Fortune favored the bold… but only if they won.


End file.
